OPEN SQUEE THREAD: The Squee-A-Long

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Welcome to the very first Open Squee Thread for the SF Squeecast, where you can share your squee with the world (or at least, our listeners)!

Rules for Open Squee Thread:

1.Be squeeful about the work of others. Suggestions may only come from those who are not directly involved in the creation of the object of squee. No suggesting books, media, etc. where you yourself are the creator/writer/editor/producer. Any item so suggested will be ignored. And possibly deleted, if the moderator is feeling cranky.

2. It’s not enough to tell us that you think something is squee-worthy and just list it. Tell us why. This is your chance to intrigue our listeners into checking something out. Be original. Be funny if you can. Tell us in glorious detail how and why your suggestion is made of awesome.

3. Do not harsh the squee of others’ suggestions. Squee is intensely personal; harshing someone else’s squee is not cool. If someone suggests [x], DO NOT follow up with “no, [x] is TERRIBLE. You should look at [y] instead, which is way more awesome.” If someone else’s suggestion is not your cup of tea, post your own without slamming someone else’s.

4 Responses to “OPEN SQUEE THREAD: The Squee-A-Long”

I’d like to squee about an amazing little book called “Civilization and the Limpet.”

The premise of this short book is pretty amazing: What if the grandson of H.G. Wells grew up to be a marine biologist and, in studying denizens of the ocean, learned strange mostly unpopularized facts about them, which he scribbled into a journal shortly before the Shoggoths ate him?

And what if this were all true? Well it is. It’s all true except the Shoggoths.

Martin Wells writes delightfully lucid prose, that’s both witty and intellectually engaging, about all sorts of bizarre life forms: sea urchins, cephalopods, limpets, and, of course, fish. This book is filled with brilliant, short essays about said denizens that could well threaten to alter the way you view life on earth. Frankly, I’m still reeling from concepts such as the similarity in the number of heartbeats we mammals get in a lifetime — until we humans got better at staving off death, we averaged the same the number of heartbeats as a mouse; the mouse just overclocks its little heart to burn through them in a much shorter time interval. All this comes up as Wells ruminates on “How Hot is a Fish,” an essay ostensibly about how fast fish cool off their bodies to avoid overheating when escaping predators.

And the whole book’s like that. Amazing facts about amazing critters, mostly written in self-contained 10 page essays, that once again reveal life on earth is more bizarre than any Hollywood alien.

If nothing else, the book should be read to encounter the extraordinary navigational systems of limpets, something so eerie and unexplained it could have come straight out of Lovecraft.

This book will change the way you view the world. And, it’s funny. Civilization and the Limpet by Martin Wells.

I was reminded this week of my pure squee for Greg Rucka’s novel, A Fistful of Rain.

Without spoilers for the plot, here’s why I love this book so much.

Rucka understands that people lie to themselves for reasons. We lie to ourselves because it works, because it gives us something, because we need to. We lie to ourselves to protect ourselves from things that hurt. The bigger the hurt we’re avoiding, the stronger the lies.

Yet, at some point, the workarounds we use to get through dysfunctional situations run up against people and events that we don’t have to defend against. And the workarounds, well, they don’t work so well anymore.

That’s the point at which we have to be brave. We have to look at the workarounds and the lies with a clear gaze. We have to thank them for the help they’ve provided, and then show those lies the door. We have to step through pain and towards truth.

A while back I was looking into self publishing and came across a helpful site. It was written by Christian Cantrell, who had written a few short stories and novellas. As a thank you for sharing his self-publishing experiences, I bought one of his Kindle books. I can’t remember which one, but I ended up buying more of them.